Battle with cancer drives Dunaway to fight back

Written by BY Lil Battle Long
Thursday, 19 August 2010 15:58

AUTHOR’S NOTE: My first assignment as a freelance writer for The Tunica Times was to write a story about the Relay for Life that’s coming up Friday, August 27. So I sent a list of thought provoking questions to Linda Dunaway, who is still in the fight of her life, and I was so taken by her own words I didn’t change a thing. I hope they mean as much to you as they did to me.

When the doctor walked into the recovery room in May of 2007, I knew before he spoke that my world at that moment would never be the same. I truly can’t remember my first reaction at that moment, my focus immediately was on my husband. As I looked at Joe I could see all the fear and bad memories racing through his mind of his mother’s painful battle with cancer. It was then that I knew I had to do everything I could to battle this disease. Telling the children was the hardest part; they had the same look and the fear and shock in their faces, and this was harder for me than all of the treatments I went through. All I knew at that time was I never wanted to see that pain in their faces again.